Reamde

The concierge gave him another smile and slid the paper across the counter to him. Sokolov accepted it with profuse thanks, walked out the door, climbed into a taxi, and took it to another Western business hotel half a mile up the road. There, he availed himself of a free computer in the lobby, where he typed the spy’s English address into Google Maps.

This yielded a close-up view of an irregular street pattern, which told him nothing, so he zoomed out until he could see the whole island. He checked the scale and verified his general impression that Gulangyu was no more than a couple of kilometers in breadth. He tried to get a sense of its layout, its cardinal directions: basically, how to get to and from the ferry terminal even if he were lost. Then he turned on the satellite imagery. From this a few things were obvious. First of all, its transportation system was much more finely meshed than was hinted by the street plan, which only depicted perhaps 10 percent of the roads and rights-of-way. Or perhaps those were not roads, but alleys and walkways, private footpaths among the buildings. Second, the buildings were all roofed in tasteful earthtones, contrasting with the garish tile and sheet metal that tended to protect Xiamen’s buildings from the rain. Third, there was a lot of greenery. Fourth, the place names tended to be schools, academies, colleges, and the like; and the presence of large oval running tracks and so on suggested that they were rather nice schools.

To paraphrase Tolstoy, all rich places were alike, but each poor place was poor in its own way. The slums of Lagos, Belfast, Port-au-Prince, and Los Angeles each would have presented a completely different and bewildering panoply of risks. But just from looking at this map, Sokolov knew that he could go to Gulangyu and walk its streets and make his way in the place just as well as he could in a parky suburb of Toronto or London.

He did not want to arouse undue attention by printing it out, so he sketched a rudimentary map onto the back of the note he had received from the concierge and spent a while examining the satellite view of the building in question, getting a rough idea as to its layout and the general shape of its grounds. He noted that there was a hotel nearby, standing on considerably higher ground. Its website informed him that it had a terrace where drinks were served in the afternoons.

He bought a man-purse from a store in the hotel lobby and dropped his CamelBak and other few possessions into it, then carried it down to the waterfront where he took the next ferry to Gulangyu.

BY NO MEANS had the planning of the taxi-ramming operation developed to an advanced state during the fifteen seconds between its conception in Yuxia’s mind and its execution. She had not, as an example, had time to communicate any part of it to Csongor. Consequently he’d been forced to figure it out by himself and to brace for impact by putting his head against the seat in front of him. Like a lot of good plans, though, this one was extremely simple. The bad men were up to something involving a boat. Yuxia could put the sole tool at her disposal (the van) to use in wrecking same, and thereby prevent them from doing whatever.

High mountain girl that she was, she didn’t know much about boats. She was now learning that all her intuitions about them were considerably off base. There had been no question in her mind that having a taxi—to say nothing of a taxi followed by a minivan—crash into the top of one of these things would completely destroy it. Now she was dumbfounded to see that the boat was not destroyed. It still floated; it was still a boat.

Not to trivialize what had happened. Undoubtedly it had been a very bad day for the boat. It might be damaged beyond repair. But it still floated. Gazing out the destroyed windshield while hanging facedown in the safety belt, she could kind of see how it worked: the deck might be wood, but the hull was steel. And because it was floating, when things crashed into it, the water acted like a shock absorber of basically infinite capacity. The comparative frailty of the wooden deck planks actually worked to its advantage, since in snapping and bending they soaked up a lot of damage. And the stacks of empty wooden cargo pallets on top of the deck had collapsed as the taxi had fallen through them, further cushioning the impact.

Another amazing fact: Qian Yuxia had ended up on the boat! This had not been the plan at all. The idea had been to stop on the pier. But she had not reckoned on the air bag. There must have been a few moments of inattention, following the crash, when she had let her foot press down on the gas.

“Csongor?” she called. But he was no longer in the vehicle.

A phone started ringing. Not hers. It was down somewhere near her foot …